As a high school basketball official working his way into the college game, Madson spent too much of his time in the gym and on the road.

“I was working virtually every night of the week,” said Madson, an administrator for a nursing facility. “It just got to where it was the tail wagging the dog. Trying to actually have a real job and maintain a family, it just wasn’t working for me. It was starting to kind of consume my life.”

Whether it’s because of burnout, family and job commitments, travel difficulties or verbal abuse from fans, parents and coaches, officials are dropping out in higher numbers than ever. And it has officials associations searching for explanations, and possible solutions, to head off what could become a full-blown crisis.

In the last three years, the number of high school officials has declined by 12 percent, including 16 percent in basketball. The number of officials with four to six years of experience is down 10 percent. And the average age is trending upward, an ominous sign.

The decline is unprecedented, according to Jack Folliard, executive director of the OAOA.

“This is not unique to Oregon. It’s all over the country at the high school levels,” Folliard said.

Association commissioners say there isn’t one obvious contributing factor to why officials stop working. But Folliard believes much has to do with the changing nature of the job.

“Frankly, a lot of coaches and fans are making it a very difficult job for officials,” Folliard said. “There’s a lot more scrutiny, a lot more parental involvement and cry for accountability. There isn’t an understanding that this is like a hobby for us. We barely meet our expenses a lot of times.”

The Portland Basketball Officials Association, the state’s largest association, is feeling the pinch. The PBOA lost 30 officials in the past year, or nine percent of its membership.

“Officials are working a lot of games and they’re getting burned out at an earlier age,” PBOA commissioner Steve Scott said. “I don’t know if it’s because the economy is bad and they feel like they need to work more games, or they just enjoy doing it. But it seems their longevity is not as great now as it used to be. People are getting into it and out of it a lot quicker.”

Making sense of the trend

Officiating can be a good source of supplementary income. For a Class 6A/5A/4A varsity contest, officials make $61.50 in basketball and $61.75 in football, with slightly less pay for smaller schools, subvarsity contests and other sports. Some of the busier officials work a half-dozen games a week.

“When the economy went down four or five years ago, they were flocking to be refs, thinking they were going to make some good money,” Folliard said. “They were sort of coming into it for the wrong reasons. We find that when our economy gets better, our numbers go down.”

Membership for the Portland Football Officials Association has held relatively steady in the 180s in recent years. But the PFOA began taking a proactive approach three years ago by forming a recruiting and retention committee, which has recently stepped up its efforts.

PFOA commissioner Dave Robbins said it’s not uncommon for recruiting classes of 20 or more officials to drop off to about five or six within five years.

“It’s a concern. Absolutely, we’re keeping our eye on it,” Robbins said. “Not only are we worried about not getting new people, but we’re worried about the attrition. We’d like to secure guys for 10 or 20 years all the time. It’s hard.”

The PFOA is making a more concerted effort to document why officials leave.

“We can’t pinpoint one clear area,” Robbins said. “When we’re asked for reasons, we’ve gotten them all over the board.”

Scott said increased travel time in the Portland area has “become a real issue” for PBOA officials. Driving across town in late afternoon and early evening can take well more than an hour.

“Travel in the metro area is real tough for us compared to 20 or 30 years ago,” Scott said. “You used to be able to drive across town in half an hour. People are tired of driving and fighting traffic all the time.”

When they arrive, officials often have to deal with a level of verbal abuse that they say is increasing. Scott said that fans are getting bolder with officials, in some instances approaching them as they stand at parade rest during halftime.

“They just feel like they can be more vocal now, I think, than they were before,” Scott said. “I think there was a measure of decorum in past years, for the most part, and I think some fans have set that aside.”

Madson said verbal abuse wasn’t a driving force for him leaving the game, “but it was certainly a consideration. The coaches at the high school level were some of the worst because there was very little oversight for a lot of them.”

Trouble ahead?

There was a time when officials associations had a built-in pool of members in educators. Bob Wellnitz, the recently retired PFOA commissioner, said that when he began officiating in the early 1960s, up to 50 percent of the officials were teachers.

“I did a survey two years ago, and I only had 11 teachers out of 188 guys,” Wellnitz said. “I don’t know why they quit working, but they did.”

Jack Folliard (Jerry Ulmer/The Oregonian)

Folliard estimated that out of the roughly 300 officials in the PBOA, fewer than five are teachers.

“Maybe they tired of working all day with kids,” Folliard said. “Their pay is a lot better now than it used to be, correctly so, and maybe that’s a factor.”

Over the years, associations have increasingly relied on officials who work 9-to-5 jobs. Considering many games start at 4 p.m., many officials count on the good graces of their employers to get off work early, a prospect that becomes even more tenuous in a struggling economy.

“Most of them retire or quit because of the real world,” Wellnitz said. “They have real jobs and they find out real quick, ‘Oh, no, I’ve got to be there at 4, and I can’t get off work.’ I bet I’ve lost one-third of the guys because of that.”

Most associations have a loyal core of experienced officials, but statistics show that it is aging. The average age of officials is up one percent to 45.

“That scares us, too,” Folliard said. “If it keeps creeping up, then pretty soon the number of officials is going to drop off tremendously because the older guys just simply can’t work anymore.”

The numbers for volleyball and soccer officials have held steady, but in the last two years, baseball and softball umpires have declined by 9.8 and 4.0 percent, respectively. The most glaring loss is in wrestling, which is down 23 percent in a three-year span.

The drop in officials has outpaced the decline in the number of contests as schools have cut some subvarsity programs in the last 10 years because of shrinking budgets. If the trend continues, it will reach a breaking point, according to Folliard.

“The problem is not going to be at the varsity level. There will always be enough officials to work the varsity games,” he said. “The problem is going to be at the freshman, sophomore, JV level.”